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RootsTech 2015

Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Thursday, February 20, 2014

MyHeritage.com Website for Promoting all the Cemeteries in the World now live

I got an update from Daniel Horowitz of MyHeritage.com concerning the partnership with BillionGraves.com. I certainly understood that MyHeritage.com is into supporting with their global community to preserve and document gravestones worldwide for the next few years. Their announcement may have led people to believe that this could be accomplished in a matter of weeks, but of course, we understood that the project roll out would take some time but that the project itself would take quite a bit longer. The website for accomplishing this momentous task is now live:

Does this mean that the gravemarker race is now on? I certainly hope so because all of us out here in the genealogy community can certainly benefit from the preservations of all those millions of gravemarkers. Oh, by the way, here is the description of the project from the new landing page:

MyHeritage has teamed up with BillionGraves in the great initiative of documenting every headstone in the world with the free and simple to use BillionGraves app.

BillionGraves is MyHeritage's preferred cemetery headstone crowdsourcing application. With patent-pending technology, translations into 25 major languages, as well as advanced systems for handling Gregorian, Hebrew and Julian dates, BillionGraves is the best international application for documenting and preserving headstone information. It's fun, too! (in a unique way that only genealogists would understand).

Register for free on this page. Then download the free mobile application for any iOS or Android device. All information you contribute will be posted on BillionGraves and MyHeritage SuperSearch where it will be free for all users. MyHeritage Record Matching will match it for free to the 27 million family trees on MyHeritage.

Hmm. Interesting that the largest cemetery in Phoenix, Arizona, the Greenwood Memorial Cemetery, with tens of thousands of gravemarkers has only about 40 images on BillionGraves.com and only 11 images on FindAGrave.com. It certainly looks like both of these sites have a ways to go yet. I also note that cremations may pose a challenge.

4 comments:

Cremations: I don't know about BillionGraves but there are numerous memorials for persons on FindAGrave for people without burials - either no stone or cremation - I have created a few myself but only for those which I have some kind of source to back up the claim.

I don't understand your statement about Greenwood Memorial Cemetery in Phoenix having "only 11 images on FindAGrave.com". I just checked and it has 26,592 interments and 79% of these have photos. It is listed as "Greenwood Memory Lawn Cemetery". Could that be the confusion?

OK, sorry about that. I can't figure out now where I got any of those figures. BillionGraves.com has three different names listed for that same cemetery. One listing has 33 images for Greenwood Memorial Lawn Cemetery, 40 images for Greenwood Memory Lawn Mortuary and Cemetery and none for Greenwood Memory Lawn Cemetery. FindAGrave.com has two different names, Greenwood Memory Lawn Cemetery and Greenwood Memorial Cemetery. FindAGrave.com shows 26,598 Internments with 79% photographed. It is not clear if they think that this is total number in cemetery because it is stated on the FindAGrave.com page that the Cemetery has over 100,000 burials. When I was inquiring about scanning their records, I was told they had over 250,000 or so records of burials. I did not verify the higher number. Sorry about any confusion.